Laguna Beach bets on tech to aid in times of fire, disaster

Laguna Beach continues to explore ways to leverage technology to prepare the community to respond to emergency situations, from a system that phases traffic light patterns for first responders to high-flying drones.

Public safety leaders appeared before the City Council on Tuesday night to share updates on the city’s wildfire mitigation and fire safety plan.

An ad hoc committee was reconvened to tackle such a plan in the wake of wildfires that ravaged the Los Angeles area in early 2025. It has since helped shape a number of priority projects, including fuel modification zones, utility undergrounding and community-based education workshops around evacuation planning and home hardening.

City officials now have their eyes on expanding the use of technology, including a traffic signal priority system that would assist emergency vehicles in getting to their destination.

Police Chief Jeff Calvert said he pushed for the system — serviced by Opticom — when the city rolled out its initial wildfire mitigation and fire safety plan in 2019. The technology, he said, allows first responders to arrive at the scene of an emergency quicker and prevents such vehicles from entering an intersection simultaneously.

“Our surrounding cities in Newport, Irvine and Dana Point all have this technology installed on their signals,” Calvert said. “In fact, our fire department has the technology installed on their fire engines, but it can’t be used in Laguna Beach. It’s for other cities. … Other cities have the technology, and when they come into our city, they’re not getting the signals phasing to green, because we don’t have the technology on our existing signals. It’ll reduce response times and also give our mutual aid responders access when they enter our city.”

The traffic signal priority system comes with an estimated cost of $766,000. Other wildfire mitigation efforts planned for implementation in fiscal year 2026-27 include drone technology for $530,559 and two additional outdoor warning system sirens, at a cost of $265,000.

Sarah Limones, Laguna Beach’s emergency operations coordinator, said the city is running quarterly tests of its emergency outdoor warning system, with the next test scheduled for Tuesday at 4 p.m.

“We’ve conducted the gap analysis on the outdoor warning system, and we know that we need about 12 to 15 more siren speakers to provide citywide coverage,” Limones said. “Two [more] of the speakers went to City Council at the last meeting for approval, and those should be installed by fall of this year.”

On drone technology, Calvert said public safety agencies have taken to putting pods on top of buildings to deploy them from different locations, providing video and situational awareness to dispatchers and officers headed to a call for service.

“We’ll need three pods to have full coverage with our city,” Calvert told the council. “With this technology, during red-flag days, we can fly the drones — using thermal imaging — to look for hot spots.”

The drones could also be used to sweep canyons and look for homeless encampments, Calvert said.

As for who might staff the drone program, Calvert said the police department had a vacant community services officer position that could be converted to a drone operator.